Movie review: 'Marston' is not so wonderful

Thursday

Oct 12, 2017 at 11:59 AMOct 12, 2017 at 12:05 PM

By Ed Symkus/For The Patriot Ledger

When you have a story with so many ingredients, a slew of moving parts that only begin to make sense when they start to coalesce, it might have been wiser to make “Professor Marston and the Wonder Women” as a four-hour, two-part TV miniseries rather than a two-hour film.

The two main stories told here about William Moulton Marston, the Harvard psychology professor who also created the Wonder Woman comic book, are of enough interest that each could have stood on its own: His Harvard days in the 1920s, when Marston (Luke Evans) taught an all-female Radcliffe class about how emotions lead to deception, then formed what started as a ménage à trois with his wife/assistant Elizabeth (Rebecca Hall) and one of his students Olive (Bella Heathcote); and his post-teaching days in the 1940s, when he created, under a pseudonym, the extremely popular Wonder Woman comic book, then got into heaps of controversy with powerful, women-led conservative groups that accused him and his comic book of celebrating bondage, torture and spanking, and of promoting lesbianism.

The complexities of what writer-director Angela Robinson tries to juggle here also include radical feminism, jealousy, the repercussions of coming from a broken family, an attraction to pornography, the supposition that one person can love two other people equally, the dismissal of comic books as trashy entertainment, and – best for last – Marston being credited with the invention of the lie detector, which plays a big part in his research work at Harvard.

There’s just too much going on in this film – all of it played out at a very slow pace – and not enough focus on any one subject for everything to come together in a satisfactory manner. And that’s even before it gets into a detailed study of its characters.

Marston is a smart, ambitious and driven man who, kind of like the script, has too many ideas going on in his head at once, and he’s determined to get to all of them.

Elizabeth is probably even smarter than her husband, but she’s outspoken, loud, brash, compulsive and frustrated that the Harvard of the 1920s refuses to let her earn a Ph.D. there.

Olive, the victim of that broken family, is engaged to a young man but finds herself emotionally and later physically attracted to both Marston and Elizabeth.

Robinson tries to pull everything together by jumping back and forth in time and place, attempting to explain how events in Marston’s personal life eventually sparked the creation of, and provided plots for, Wonder Woman.

But Robinson doesn’t even stop there. She looks into the always-challenging relationship between Marston and the two women in his life, which is both neat and messy, and which eventually includes the children he had with both of them.

She also takes time to check in on what was going on at National Comics, which had Wonder Woman under its superhero banner, and whose publisher, M.C. Gaines (Oliver Platt), wasn’t sure how to deal with the success and the trouble that Marston caused for the company. Watch out for those straight-laced straitlaced folks at the National League of Decency!

On the plus side, the film is packed with brave and exciting performances – even with all of my complaints, I wish Platt had more screen time – and by the three-quarters point, most of the stories have started to merge.

But that’s far too late for any kind of smooth continuity. The whole movie is just too complicated.